What is politics, commodification and capitalism? Tania Li visits the Global Development Institute
By Judith Krauss
What is politics? A loaded question which might draw any number of diverse and partly conflicting answers. Yet if you were indeed going to open this particular can of worms, it would be extremely helpful to have Tania Murray Li available to offer her perspective.
The Global Development Institute (GDI) did just that this week, inviting the Professor of Anthropology from the University of Toronto to give a Masterclass on ‘What is politics?’ and a public lecture on ‘Commodification, capitalism and counter-movements’. The high level of interest from staff, students and the general public in Tania Li’s visit evidences the breadth and depth of her contributions.
Two of her best-known ideas include ‘rendering technical’, which means framing problems and their solutions in a way that lends itself to technical fixes without addressing root causes, and the ‘will to improve’ capturing a host of social development aspirations. Her reflections, drawing particularly on ethnographic research in Southeast Asia, resonate with scholars and practitioners in anthropology, geography, political economy, development studies and beyond.
Given her diverse work, the Masterclass brought together postgraduate researchers and staff from GDI and beyond whose research interests are just as multi-faceted as the person they had come to exchange with, ranging from mining and CSR to youth activism in Ethiopia. It was the second Masterclass organised by the Rory and Elizabeth Brooks Doctoral College, following a previous exchange with Branko Milanovic on inequality and its links to migration.
Given GDI’s focus on communicating research to stakeholders, Tania Li’s thoughts on the interface between researchers and practitioners, outlined in a 2013 paper in ‘Anthropologie et développement’, proved of particular interest. She identified three types of engagement between anthropological research and development practitioners, ranging from research in the service of big D development programming via an outright critique of such programmes, to an in-depth engagement with small d development, historically specific conjunctures and political struggles. The conversation raised questions such as whether pressures to ‘render technical’ may limit a priori the types of problems and potential solutions considered, the matter of framing research in the language of or delineation to certain stakeholders, and also yielded a wider engagement with issues of researcher positionality.
This question of researchers’ role and the politics of research proved another key interest for the early-career and postgraduate researchers assembled, with questions arising on insider-outsider relationships between researchers and stakeholders and managing expectations. Tania Li drew on her diverse experience in interacting with a broad range of stakeholders to emphasise the difference between critical engagement and passing judgement, highlighting the importance of contextualising stakeholder situations and thus engaging in critical, but non-judgemental analysis. A second key insight she raised, drawing also on David Mosse’s work, was the need to remember that taking a step back to write analytically about stakeholder behaviour is inherent in the research process and in scholars’ function of thinking critically. Howeverit also creates a distance which neither researchers nor interlocutors may have anticipated.
Tania Li’s public lecture, drawing especially on her latest book Land’s End , emphasised the need for critical reflection especially on all assumptions habitually associated with commodification, capitalism and counter-movements. Illustrated vividly through examples from two decades of ethnographic research in Sulawesi, Indonesia, she challenged the audience to engage critically with what commodification, capitalism and counter-movements actually mean and to what degree they constitute new phenomena. For instance, she emphasised that commodification, the purchase and sale of e.g. products, land or labour, is not at all a recent invention.
However, the difficulty arises when such exchanges are no longer voluntary transactions from a position of autonomy, but become compulsory for survival in the absence of any alternative. This distinction, drawing partly on Wood and Brenner, is highly relevant in differentiating commodification from involuntary forces often inherent in capitalist relations.
She vividly supported this distinction using her ethnographic research in communities living in mountainous areas in Sulawesi. Over a 20-year period, as land resources grew scarcer and pressure increased to make the most of existing plots, she witnessed first an increasing shift from food production to cash-crop cocoa cultivation and then a process of land concentration in the hands of the most capable farmers, leaving many now landless families struggling to find alternative livelihoods. Finally, she highlighted that bottom-up counter-movements against land commodification would be predicated on the presence of social organisational structures which are unlikely to exist everywhere:. actual counter-movements tend to be top-down to accommodate privileged land access vested elite or colonial interests.
Tania Li’s inspiring Masterclass and public lecture doubled as imperatives never to stop engaging critically and questioning one’s own and others’ assumptions, a call worthy of application throughout academic life and beyond.
The next Global Development Seminar is Wednesday 20 April, on ‘Understanding youth poverty in Arusha, Tanzania: Capturing economic, social and psychological dimensions’ with Dr. Nicola Banks and you can also see a full listing of our events.
Finding the business case for CSR
This post critiquing an article in Harvard Business Review article caught my attention recently. I’m catching up on old reading here but this article rehashes the perennial debate about ‘the business case for CSR’. The HBR article basically argues we’re asking too much of CSR if we’re asking it to make money:
“There is increasing pressure to dress up CSR as a business discipline and demand that every initiative deliver business results. That is asking too much of CSR and distracts from what must be its main goal: to align a company’s social and environmental activities with its business purpose and values. If in doing so CSR activities mitigate risks, enhance reputation, and contribute to business results, that is all to the good. But for many CSR programs, those outcomes should be a spillover, not their reason for being.”
The response of CSR consultant Richard Hardyment is that “This is dangerous talk” and accuses HBR (not the authors, oddly) of “winding back the clock”. That if such arguments are entertained seriously all the good work of those arguing that there is a business case would be undone. If nothing else, this demonstrates a lack of conviction that the business case is a solid one that can stand some testing and scrutiny. One of the best (titled) articles on the subject makes the argument that the fact that the business case has been debated for so long (they survey decades of research) without conclusive evidence being presented only further undermines the argument for its existence.
There is a quite remarkable volume of literature about whether CSR initiatives make money or not, and the response summarises many of the arguments, but in my experience, the business case is a central if difficult to quantify argument. And when I say central, many think that, without it, CSR initiatives in the mining industry are pretty much dead in the water. However, things are a little more complex than a simple black/white argument.
In Aseem Prakash’s pioneering work on companies going ‘beyond compliance’ in the US pharmaceuticals industry, such policies were often adopted without a clear business case being presented. In my own research in the mining industry, the language of ‘risk’ fills this gap between fuzzy, complex social world and hard numbers on the balance sheet. If you have to give away a massive mine as BHP did with OK Tedi in 2001 then CSR initiatives (and tailings management) were clearly a sensible investment. If you can get away without doing this and skirt the potential high costs of conflict, then there’s not really a ‘business case’. It’s not black and white and cannot be given a final answer, however much we may wish one. The ‘business case’ remains quite elusive and in David Vogel’s words, “niche”.
The tone of the response seems a little hysterical to me and stirs up my skepticism about whether there is something of the emperors new clothes about the universal push for CSR. The question of whether there is a business case is a perfectly legitimate one to be asked by any scholar (even those who choose overblown article titles like ‘The Truth About CSR’). That it is an uncomfortable one for those who’s livelihoods depend on it should surprise no one.
This post was first published on Tomas’ Mining and CSR blog.
GDI at the Development Studies Association Conference
The Global Development Institute is helping to convene seven panels at the annual DSA conference in September. The focus of the conference is politics in development.
For full details of each session and to proposed a paper, click on the title.
Power, politics and digital development [Information, Technology and Development Study Group]
Convenors: Richard Heeks (University of Manchester), Mark Graham (University of Oxford), Ben Ramalingam (Institute of Development Studies)
The panel will cover the broad intersection of power, politics and digital development including both directionalities – the impact of power and politics on design, diffusion, implementation and outcomes of ICT application; and the impact of ICT application on power and politics – and their mutual interaction.
Challenging media representations of refugees and exploring new forms of solidarity
Convenors: Tanja Müller (University of Manchester), Uma Kothari (University of Manchester)
This panel explores the diverse representations of the current movement of refugees into Europe. Through an examination of the politics of representations the panel explores the extent to which representations have the potential to create spaces of resistance and forge new forms of solidarity.
The politics of public sector transformations
Convenor: Pablo Yanguas (University of Manchester)
The public sector remains an inescapable component of development. Moving beyond the limited agenda of public sector reform, this interdisciplinary panel addresses public sector transformation as a contentious and transnational process of organisational and political change.
China and the rising powers as development actors: looking across, looking back, looking forward [Rising Powers Study Group]
Convenors: Khalid Nadvi (University of Manchester), Alex Shankland (Institute of Development Studies), Jennifer Hsu (University of Alberta)
The emergence of China and fellow ‘rising powers’, such as Brazil, India, South Africa and Russia, is having a profound impact on international development. This panel examines the multiple interrelated ways in which rising powers are (re-)shaping international development trajectories.
The politics of the migration-development nexus: re-centring South to South migrations [Migration, Development and Social Change Study Group]
Convenors: Tanja Bastia (University of Manchester), Kavita Datta (Queen Mary)
This panel aims to re-frame the migration-development nexus from the perspectives of regional South-South migrations and interrogate the potential for a more expansive migration-development nexus which extends beyond financial and economic priorities to consider wider political concerns.
Global production networks and the politics and policies of development
Convenors: Rory Horner (University of Manchester), Matthew Alford (University of Manchester), Fabiola Mieres (Durham University)
Global value chains and production networks constitute the backbone of global trade and are subject to attention by both policymakers and political contestation. This 2 session panel explores the economic, social and environmental challenges of GPNs and their developmental policy ramifications.
Beyond the ‘new’ new institutionalism: debating the real comparative politics of development
Convenors, Kunal Sen (University of Manchester), Sam Hickey (University of Manchester)
The panel addresses how politics shapes economic/social development through a focus on the findings of the Effective States and Inclusive Development research centre. The presentation of the findings will be followed by a discussion of their implications for rethinking the politics of development.
Would increased migration reduce global inequality?
By Daniele Malerba
Inequality is a topic of major interest nowadays, with recent reports showing that the richest 62 individuals possess more wealth than the bottom half of the global population. But this attention has not always been there.
One the main drivers of this new “inequality movement” has been the recent recession, coupled with the stagnant incomes of the middle classes. But Branko Milanovic, one of the pioneers of this movement, discussed also the importance of data improvements in the recent trend of inequality analysis.
During a masterclass with PhD students at the Global Development Institute, he argued that the increased availability of household level data has been impressive. This is especially true for Africa where the coverage rate increased by more than 20% in the last 20 years. Current advancements in the availability of data also includes: fiscal information to complement household surveys, the use of top incomes in inequality estimates (as they are not represented in common household surveys) and information on inequality of wealth. Improvements in the amount of information available is also helping to develop new fields of inquiry, such as the concept of inequality of opportunities as opposed to inequality of outcomes, the decomposition of inequality and growth, and historical inequalities.
Moreover, the increased coverage of data and the effects of globalisation, has enabled the study of global inequality, the inequality between all individuals in the world, regardless of country. In his public lecture, Milanovic, who has been assembling data from different countries in order to build a global income distribution, explained his findings and the policy implication for some of today’s main issues, such as migration and the future of the middle class.
Inequality between and within countries
To better understand global inequality, it is important to separate it conceptually it into inequality within nations and inequality between nations.
Inequality within countries, measured by the national Gini coefficients, increased in most nations between 1988 and 2008. The increase was mainly driven by market inequality (wages and returns from financial assets), which was cushioned by the use of redistributive capacity to make final disposable income less unequal.
More interestingly Milanovic pointed out that the majority of countries experiencing increasing inequality, such as the US, might be on a second Kuznets curve. On the other hand countries like Brazil (and many other LACs) and China are still moving along the first Kuznets curve. Their experience of decreasing inequality is the result of increased spending on social transfers, reduction of the education premium and minimum wages.
Inequalities between nations, which is usually conceptualized as looking at differences between country’s mean incomes, has decreased in the past 20 yearsmainly due to growth in Asian countries. Despite this, some facts remain striking. The figure below shows, for example, that not only is the mean income in Denmark’s remarkably higher when compared to a group of African countries; but there is also no overlap between the income distributions. This means that the poorest group in Denmark is richer than the richest group in Uganda (excluding billionaires which are not represented in household surveys). Similar patterns can be found comparing many rich and poor countries.
Finally, what if we look then at global inequality as a whole? First of all 1988-2008 was the biggest reshuffling on incomes since the industrial revolution. Decline in global inequality was accompanied by four main features: the large gains captured by the top 1% of the global distribution, the growth of the Asian middle-class, the “zero-growth” of the middle class of many western states such as the US, and the stagnant incomes of the bottom of the global distributions. The second and third points brought the emergence of what Milanovic calls the “global middle class” who earn between $10 and $100 US dollars a day. The size of the rising Asian middle class also meant that the global median income has been rising at a faster rate than the global mean income.
Secondly, the major driver of inequality is still location (between countries), meaning the country where you are born largely determines your income. As shown previously using the example of Denmark and African countries, the poorest group in one country might be richer than the richest group in another country. This is a change from 1850, when inequality was more prevalent between class (within country inequality) and location, representing Marx’s “world of classes”. The projections for the future, with the rise of Asia suggest the continuation of the current trend of diminishing importance of the location component, which might translate into further reduced global inequality (as well as structural change of the inequality decomposition).
The implications for migration
Milanovic outlined a number of policy implications that could reduce global inequality. The first possible solution is to increase growth in poor countries (and their mean incomes). The second tool is migration.
When people migrate from poor to rich countries their income increases. Given the importance of the location as a determinant of inequality, the gains are potentially large. In addition to this, the costs associated with travelling are reducing, meaning that labour supply is increasingly being globalized – in a way that hasn’t happened previously.
Does this mean advocating for growth in the rate of migration from poor to rich countries? Milanovic proposes trade-offs between migration and citizenship rights; this means allowing intermediate cases of partial citizenship, in order to mitigate migration flows. Regardless of the specifics, his proposals suggest one important thing: we need to get serious about global inequality and its consequences.
You can listen to Branko Milanovic’s lecture ‘Globalization, migration and the future of the middle classes‘ in full here:
Watch | Uma Kothari ‘Is water safer than the land? Public perceptions of Syrian refugees and the power of a warm welcome’
Professor Uma Kothari’s lecture was part of ‘Your Manchester Insights’.
Listen | Branko Milanovic on globalisation and the middle classes
Professor Branko Milaonvic spoke at the Global Development Institute on ‘Globalization, migration and the future of the middle classes’.
Branko is a leading scholar on income inequality. He is Presidential fellow at City University of New York, Visiting Presidential Professor and Senior Scholar in the Luxembourg Income Studies Center. He previously served as Lead Economist in the World Bank’s research department. He is the author of The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality, as well as numerous articles on methodology and empirics of global income distribution and effects of globalization.
Call for Abstracts: “Big and Open Data for International Development” workshop
Big and Open Data for International Development workshop
Tuesday 12 July 2016, Centre for Development Informatics, University of Manchester, UK
This is a call for abstracts/presentations on big and open data for international development, with an initial deadline of 30 April 2016.
In recent years, there has been growing activity around the “data revolution” in international development including formation of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. As ever-more and ever-faster data is available about trends, patterns and processes, then related decision/action systems will be significantly affected. Growth in research in this field has been slower and much remains to be done, particularly in bringing a socio-technical perspective to the creation, processing and use of new forms of data in development.
The aim of this workshop is to share socio-technical, socio-organisational and critical research on “data revolution” trends: most notably big data and open data. We hope the workshop will shape a future research agenda and form the basis for future research partnerships.
The following timeline will be observed:
- 30 April 2016 – prospective presenters to submit an abstract of 200-400 words outlining their proposed presentation to: cdi@manchester.ac.uk
- 8 May 2016 – presenters to be notified of response to abstract
- 8 July 2016 – draft papers (desirable but not essential) to be circulated to workshop participants
- 12 July 2016 – workshop in Manchester for presentation and discussion of papers
If you have any queries prior to abstract submission, do please ask.
Anita Greenhill, Richard Heeks, Jaco Renken, Pedro Sampaio
Centre for Development Informatics, University of Manchester, UK
We acknowledge funding support for this workshop from the Alliance Manchester Business School and Global Development Institute of the University of Manchester
Uganda field trip by GDI students
Some of our Master’s students are currently on fieldwork in Uganda. This video, of the March 2015 trip, gives an insight into their visit.
Last year three of our students also wrote blogs about the fieldwork they carried out. You can read them now.
Listen | Tomas Frederiksen on corporate social responsibility in the mining sector
Dr Tomas Frederiksen spoke last week as part of the Global Development Seminar Series. Tomas discussed whether corporate social responsibility in the mining sector can deliver development.
Listen to the talk:
The Global Development Seminar Series brings together scholars involved in cutting edge research on international development. It aims to facilitate dialogue and discussion, providing a space for leading development thinkers to share their latest research ideas
Find out more about the other seminars in the Global Development Seminar Series.
Do global value chains lead to forced labour?
Malaysia is a country which has experienced tremendous economic growth from the 1970s onwards, moving to upper-middle income status in the mid-1990s (Felipe 2012). One of the key industrial sectors that led its transition out of an agrarian society to an industrial one was the electronics industry. Malaysia was one of the first developing countries that inserted itself into the vast global value chain of the electronics industry.
Malaysia was one of the earliest locations where multinational corporations established offshored factories in the country’s free trade zones in the early 1970s. This led to a creation of a set of domestic firms, which specialised as suppliers of parts and components to a large number of multinational corporations in the country. While there was significant growth and some upgrading during the 1980s, the industry and importantly domestic firms have experienced stagnation since the late 1990s. The electronics industry in Malaysia has been unable to upgrade further and move up the global value chain (in value added terms) for many years (Rasiah et al 2015). Critically, it faces competition with new production locations such as Viet Nam and India.
A major reason behind the failure of the electronics industry in Malaysia to grow further is its deep embeddedness in the global value chain. Malaysia entered the electronics industry global value chain with very little domestic capability of its own. Rather, the industry was created with an excessive openness to foreign investment and multinational corporations. Multinational corporations did not only bring production to Malaysia, they also brought with them a set of interests, which were taken up by the Malaysian government as policies, to maintain the industry as low cost and labour intensive.
One of these policies has been the maintenance of low wages in the industry. As the Malaysian economy grew and wages rose during the 1990s, domestic workers were no longer interested in the low paid factory jobs offered by multinational corporations in the electronics industry. The solution to this problem, which was backed by large multinational corporations with large factories in the country, was an influx of low paid foreign workers. Today, foreign workers are a significant feature of the electronics industry in Malaysia. While there are no exact numbers, there are estimates that up to 60% of the workforce in large factories are foreign workers (personal interview 2015). The majority of these workers hold temporary contracts and are hired by labour agencies, which are poorly regulated and whose networks are not transparent (Simpson 2013).
The demand for low paid workers, has also, tragically, led to a high incidence of forced labour (Verite 2014). In its damning report, which was commissioned and funded by the United States Department of Labor, Verite (2014) found that a third of the 501 workers it interviewed were in a situation of forced labour. This report raises serious questions about how an upper middle-income country which hosts major electronics firms with global reputations, such as Intel, Hewlett-Packard, AMD, and Motorola (note: the report does not name which firms were found to have forced labour), has found itself in a situation of forced labour amongst its foreign workers. It also raises questions of how global value chains are implicated in the incidence of forced labour.
For Malaysia, there are various factors at play. An excessive openness to foreign investment has led to the inability of domestic firms to upgrade in the electronics industry. The large and significant presence of multinational corporations has essentially led to a crowding out of domestic innovation and capabilities. More significantly, multinational corporations in Malaysia are interested in maintaining the production location as low cost and labour intensive as possible (Raj-Reichert 2016). While this would normally contradict with characteristics of an upper middle-income country, Malaysia has, however, artificially maintained low wages with the influx of foreign workers (Malaysia is reported to have the largest number of foreign workers in South-East Asia (The World Bank 2013)). This is being done through a network of labour agencies that are poorly regulated, largely non-transparent, and which have historical roots of informal worker recruitment dating back to the 1970s (Chin 2002).
The combination of a fast paced order and delivery schedule of the electronics industry global value chain and government policies, that have failed in innovative upgrading and that have resorted to maintaining a large multinational corporation dominated low cost labour intensive industry, are significant factors which have led to forced labour in the electronics industry in Malaysia.
References:
Chin, CBN (2002) The ‘host’ state and the ‘guest’ worker in Malaysia: Public management and migrant labour in times of economic prosperity and crisis, Asia Pacific Business Review, 8 (4), 19-40.
Felipe, J (2012) Tracking the Middle-Income Trap: What is it, who is it, and why? Asian Development Bank Economics Working Paper Series.
Raj-Reichert (2016) ‘How global value chains contribute to the middle-income trap: a case study of the electronics industry in Malaysia’, Presentation at ‘The Political Economy of the Middle-Income Trap: Towards “Usable” Theories in Development Research” 24 February 2016, King’s College London.
Rasiah, R, Crinis, V, and Lee, H-A (2015) Industrialization and labour in Malaysia, Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy¸ 20 (1) 77-99.
Simpson, C. (2013) ‘An iPhone tester caught in Apple’s supply chain’, Bloomberg News. http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-11-07/an-iphone-tester-caught-in-apples-supply-chain#p1 (accessed 9 September 2015).
Verité (2014) ‘Forced labor in the production of electronic goods in Malaysia: A comprehensive study of scope and characteristics’. Amherst: Verité.
World Bank (2013) Migration and remittance flows: Recent trends and outlook, 2013−2016, Migration and Development Brief 21, Migration and Remittances Team, Development Prospects Group (Washington DC).
Gale Raj-Reichert is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Global Development Institute.